Three students, a iPhone app, 15,000 people inspired to do a small good deed a day.

Subscribers to the free application are prompted daily with a “DoGood”–a simple task from conserving water, to turning out a light, to beautifying the world. When they’ve accomplished their good deed for the day, they click the application’s “done” button.

The program tallies how many users are fulfilling that day’s deed, and users can …

Here’s an ingenious space-saving idea. A rethink of an often invisible object.

Give this man a design award! And where can I buy one?

Thanks to Joyce Cuff for this link.

Reframing is a useful technique to deliberately derail our entrenched thinking patterns and flows, so as to enable us to see a given situation from alternative perspectives.

Dev Patnaik documented three kinds of reframes:

Step out of your own perspective and see the world as it sees itself. (Walk in someone else’s shoes) See the world in a way that’s completely different from anyone else. (Read between the lines too …

I drew the following diagram from a description in Marty Neumeier’s book The Designful Company:

In any given endeavour, a business can choose the following approaches:

Good and different.
Different but not good.
Not good and not different.
Good but not different.

Neumeier contends that many businesses tend to choose the same over the different – in other words, 3 and 4 from the list and diagram above. They …

“The measure of a society is how well it transforms pain and suffering into something worthwhile.” Nietzsche

From Eric Weiner’s book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search For The Happiest Places In The World. ISBN 978-0-446-69889-4.

In the current economic climate, the same can be said of businesses. How can your business transform its pain and suffering into something worthwhile. How do you decide what is worthwhile?

“As E.F. Schumacher said ‘The richer the society, the more difficult it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate payoff.’ … In a wealthy , industrialized society, … we are discouraged from doing anything that isn’t productive.” Eric Weiner in his book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search For The Happiest Places In The World. ISBN 978-0-446-69889-4.

Put another way, the wealthier we become, the less we value …

It is normal for Icelanders to have diverse and eclectic work histories because the culture, the lack of envy, not only encourages individuals to try different things but also admires failure as a noble sign of having tried. It is one of the happiest countries in the world.

“Having multiple identities … is … conducive to happiness. This runs counter to the prevailing belief in … other western nations, …

In a brainstorming session, authenticity, immediacy, free-association (without censoring), and a general willing and open atmosphere to entertain all (and I mean ALL) possibilities are essential.

Here’s a real life example:

I was in a brainstorming session with a pet supplies retailer a few months ago.

I was doing my usual no-holds-barred let everything in my head out.

Someone said – “don’t you have a cat?” I said flippantly “oh no, I’ve …

“Playfulness is the hallmark of any great human activity; it inspires innovation and change, and it nourishes the mind as well as the body.” From The Think Big Manifesto by Michael Port.

The biggest killer to play is (fear of) judgement and disapproval. External and self judgements, the latter being the hardest to mitigate and manage.

The biggest thing any creative person can learn is to not need anyone else’s …